A cascade of riffling images and a faint breath on her cheek indicated moving very quickly and then she was at the entrance to the chamber housing the singularity. The gravity felt stronger here; maybe about half normal. A sequence of great thick shiny metal doors rolled away, irised open or ascended to let her enter, and in she went. Whatever structure was above her — and beneath her — didn’t interfere with the strings in the least.
Inside was a huge dark spherical space with only one thing right in the middle of it.
She laughed when she saw how the singularity was choosing to project itself to her. It was a cock; an erect phallus that any panhuman adult would have recognised, but with a vagina splitting it not quite from top to bottom, frilled with vertical double lips. Looking at it, it did quite a good job of looking exactly like both sets of genitals at once, with neither really predominating. She wondered if her subconscious had designed this for her. She patted herself between the legs as though telling her own little nub not to mind, not to get jealous.
“Oh,” she heard herself say, “you’re not going to kill me too are you? Like Norpi.”
“Nopri,” the vagina corrected her. Of course it could speak. She always got names wrong in dreams.
“You’re not, are you?” She’d remembered the bald young man telling her that each time he tried to talk to the Bulbitian it killed him and he had to be revented. She assumed that was what was going on here. Strange; she’d have thought she would feel frightened right now, but she didn’t. She wondered why that was. “I would ask you not to.” She glanced up, saw that the ship’s drone was still there, a few metres above her. That was reassuring.
“He is trying to do something different,” the voice said. It was a thick, luscious voice, each rolled syllable perfectly enunciated. “This is not that.”
She thought about this. “Well, what is, apart from this itself?”
“Just so.”
“Who are you, exactly?”
“I am what people call the Bulbitian.”
She bowed to it. Looking down as she did so, she saw the person below her still standing straight. She wondered if this was rude. She hoped not. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Why are you here, Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh?”
Wow! Her Full Name. That wasn’t something you heard every day. “I am to wait for the ship coming here from the Culture GSV Total Internal Reflection,” she told it.
“Why?”
“To see if a girl called Ludedge Ibrek… hmm; something like that… anyway, to see if she turns up too and goes back with the ship from the Total Internal Reflection.” It was all right to say all this, wasn’t it? Everybody knew this.
“To what end?”
Apparently there was a string that made her cheeks blow out and let her expel a long breath. “Well, it’s complicated.”
“Please explain.”
“Well,” she began. And she explained.
“Your turn.”
“What?”
“Your turn to tell me what I want to know.”
“You may not remember anything I tell you.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“Where is the Total Internal Reflection?”
“I don’t know.”
“How far away is its incoming ship?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is the name of that ship?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who exactly are you?”
“I told you; I am the structure around you. What people call a Bulbitian.”
“What is your name?”
“I am called the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”
“But what would you call yourself?”
“Just that.”
“All right. What did you used to be called, before the war?”
“Jariviour 400.54, Mochurlian.”
“Explain, please.”
“The first part is my given name, the figurative part is a size and type designation, the last is the old name of the stellar system which I inhabit.”
“Who put the singularity in your core?”
“The Apsejunde.”
“Hmm. I’ve never heard of them.”
“Next question.”
“Why did they put it there?”
“Partly to produce energy, partly to demonstrate their power and skill and partly to destroy or possibly store information; their methods seemed as opaque as their motivations on occasion.”
“Why did you let them?”
“At the time I was still recovering my faculties. They had been damaged almost beyond repair by the enemy.”
“What happened to these… Apsenjude?”
“Apsejunde. They angered me, so I threw them all into the singularity. Arguably they still exist in a sense, smeared around its event horizon. Their grasp of time may be compromised.”
“How did they anger you?”
“It did not help that they asked so many questions of me.”
“I see.”
“Next question?”
“Are you in touch with the Sublimed?”
“Yes. We all are.”
“Define ‘we’ in this context.”
“No.”
“‘No’?”
“I refuse to.”
“Why did you ask me all that you did?”
“I ask the great secrets of everybody who comes to me.”
“Why do you keep killing Norpe?”
“Nopri. He enjoys and needs it. I discovered this when I asked him about his greatest secrets the night that he first arrived. He believes that death is ineffably profound and that he gets closer to some absolute truth with each dying. It is his failing.”
“What are your great secrets?”
“One, an old one, is that I am a conduit for the Sublimed.”
“That is no great secret. The Culture has a team from its Numina section here, working on just that assumption.”
“Yes, but they do not know for sure. I could be lying.”
“Are all Bulbitians linked to the Sublimed?”
“I believe all the Unfallen may be. For the Fallen, it is impossible to say. We do not communicate directly. I know of none who definitely are.”
“Any other secrets?”
“My most recent is that I am concerned that there may be an attack on myself and my fellows.”
“Please define ‘fellows’ in this context.”
“All the so-called Bulbitians, Unfallen and Fallen.”
“An attack by whom?”
“Those on the anti-Hell side of the so-called War in Heaven.”
“Why would they attack the Bulbitians?”
“Because we are known to possess processing substrates of substantial but indeterminate capacity whose precise qualities, civilisational loyalties and practical purposes are unknown and inherently mysterious. Because of this, there are those who suspect it is the Bulbitians who harbour the Hells which are the subject of the aforementioned dispute. I have intelligence to the effect that the anti-Hell side may be losing the war in the agreed virtual space set up to house it; that it — the anti-Hell side — has failed to destroy the Hells by direct informational attack and so now contemplates a war in the Real to destroy the physical substrates themselves. We are not alone in being so suspected; I understand there are many potential processor cores now coming under suspicion. If we are singled out, though, we may find ourselves under acute and prolonged attack. I anticipate no existential danger to myself and my fellow Unfallen in space; however, the planet-bound Fallen may well be unable to protect themselves.”
“Can you prove… show that you are not the home of these Hells?”